What does okay mean, really? It’s not the same definition I had yesterday, or last week, or last month. For the moment, okay means I’m alive. “Sure,” I say, but I know I can’t sound very convincing.

Benson tugs me closer. Our foreheads touch, and for a while I think that’s all he’s going to do. Then he traces one finger down my jawbone and lifts my chin. The kiss is barely more than a brush of his lips, but it’s like liquid comfort pouring into my belly and spreading through my limbs.

“Take a shower. And it’s okay if you go to sleep—I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

I nod, knowing I’ll never be able to sleep until he’s back and I’m sure he’s safe. “Be careful.”

“Don’t open the door for anyone,” he warns, even though he knows I don’t need it.

“Only you,” I promise, holding eye contact until the door closes between us. “Only you,” I repeat, setting the whispered words free.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Five minutes later I step into a scalding shower and sigh in sheer pleasure. After lathering twice I knead my sore neck, then look down to take stock of my sad, battered body. The pink scars on my right side from the plane crash—small lines where two broken ribs pierced through my skin, a staple-marked scar on my thigh where they put the worst of my broken bones back together with a metal plate, even my comparatively tiny trach and feeding tube scars—are so familiar now that it’s hard to remember what I looked like without them.

I shake my head, thinking of Elizabeth’s declaration that I’m an Earthbound. This body, riddled with scars and aches, should be proof enough that she’s wrong. Mistaken. A supernatural being couldn’t be so broken. If not for my gift, I wouldn’t believe her at all.

And now I have new marks.

An enormous bruise is purpling on my left hip from where I fell running from Quinn last night. The edges are just starting to turn yellow and the middle resembles an eggplant. My knees and hands are both scraped from the pavement earlier today and still sting a little from the vigorous scrubbing I gave them a few minutes ago.

Visually seeking out a vague throbbing on my upper arm, I see the shadow of forming bruises where Benson’s fingers dug in when he dragged me away from the car crash.

When he rescued me.

The coming bruise makes me chuckle and shake my head. I won’t tell him. He’d feel awful. Benson would never hurt me. Not intentionally.

Sometimes I think he’s the only one.

My mom.

My dad.

But they’re gone.

A small surge of guilt shoots through me as I realize I’ve hardly thought of my parents the last few days. Slowly, so slowly I didn’t realize it until just this moment, Benson has slipped into their place. The person I can trust with everything. Not just life-altering secrets like my powers and the people trying to kill me, but silly ones. The time in fourth grade when I laughed so hard I wet my pants, the baby bird that fell out of its nest that I tried to save … and how I cried when it inevitably died. The kind you only share with true intimates.

Family.

I straighten in surprise as the word races about in my brain and then settles.

But why shouldn’t Benson have become my family?

I think of Elizabeth’s warnings against him yet again and a prickle of anger makes my face heat. No one, no one, has proved as loyal as Benson. I would take him over the whole lot of them.

I stand under the hot spray until my whole body is pink, then take my time getting dressed, first blow-drying my short hair with the loud hotel blow dryer, then pulling on a simple baby tee and yoga capris and finally slathering some hotel lotion over my scratched arms and hands. It all feels like such a luxury.

I’m too keyed up to sleep. I try watching TV, but all the stations are talking about another breakout of the mysterious virus—this time in a small town just north of the Canadian border.

A one hundred percent fatality rate. It makes my stomach churn.

Jay’s words echo through my head: My work, we’ve found connections between the Reduciates and the virus, and if you walk away, I’m not sure I—

What was he going to say next? For the first time, I almost wish I’d stayed. I wish I’d listened. Could something this devastating, this random, be the work of an organization that had nothing better to do than hunt down an eighteen-year-old girl? It seemed impossible.

There’s a doctor on the news now, outlining the symptoms of the virus, the possible vectors of infection. I close my eyes, not wanting to hear.

I’m so sick of bad news.

I click off the television and turn to look at the two ancient journals. I haven’t had a chance to even skim through Rebecca’s journal since this morning, so I flip to the end so I can check out this mystery language.

The handwriting is the same, but Benson’s right: it’s impossible to read.

I turn to Quinn’s much shorter diary instead.

Quinn’s journal doesn’t go into depth, but the brief descriptions are enough. If Quinn is to be believed, these two groups—brotherhoods, he calls them—have had their fingers in everything from the French Revolution to the Knights Templar to the councils of Nicaea. History changing.

History making.

And I should have realized how ubiquitous the triangle has been as a symbol throughout history. The Templars, the Masons, the Egyptians; hell, it’s on our dollar bills. The Earthbound—and through them, these brotherhoods—are etched across the history of civilization.